Location: Hopetown
Today Dad and I woke up in Guana and had planned to go snorkeling, but sailing plans must always be adjustable. We listened to the weather and unfortunately the Abacos should be expecting fifty knot winds in just two days. Marsh Harbour has no moorings and anchoring out in fifty knot winds would be a brutal experience. Dad decided that we didn't even have time to stop at Fowl Cay to snorkel, we would have to sail straight for Hopetown, hoping to get on a mooring ball there. Hopetown Harbour is certainly a hurricane hole, with 360 degrees of protection, making it a very competitive spot for moorings. Sure enough when we got into Hopetown there wasn't a single mooring ball left. We motored around and around the harbor until finally another boater pointed out some styrofoam balls connected to a line, "this ones free," they shouted at us. Usually the lack of a large official looking mooring ball indicates that it is a private mooring, not for rent. We uneasily picked up the ball anyway and tucked in for the night, hoping that we had found somewhere we could wait out the blow. If not we would be forced to return to the sheltered harbor of Man-O-War, for my sanity this cannot occur.
Dad and I met a lot of locals in Hopetown. We got to know two of the local fisherman particularly well. Corey and JR were spear fisherman who used surface supplied oxygen to dive eighty feet deep to catch 300-500 pounds of grouper and other fish a day. They took the barbs off of their Hawaiian sling spears to ensure that if they did not immediately kill the fish at the end of their spear it would be able to get off no swim away. A struggling fish on the end of your spear is the worst thing to have an arms length from you while in the water, since sharks frequently swam toward any injured fish. But they also had skepticism that there would be a shark attack in the Bahamas. After talking to them for awhile they seemed to categorize a shark attack as merely a swimmer being grabbed off of the beach. However Corey thought it was only a matter of time before one of the stupid tourists who feed the sharks on the reef loose a hand, that didn't seem to count as an actual attack. But hat doesn't mean that they aren't afraid of them. JR often said that there is nothing to fear from a shark swimming below you, that means the shark is looking at fish below for food and not at you. When the shark is swimming above you that's when you should think of getting out of the water. I'm not so sure about this theory, but they know much more than I do. Once while Corey was diving a great shadow passed overhead, for a second he was sure a huge tiger shark was looking down on him with hungry eyes but when he looked up he saw a pod of humpback whales. They had a ton of cool fishing stories like this, and explained the ins and outs of the business down here. They even gave us about five pounds of grouper one day and took us out to the best local bars. Although Hopetown is much bigger than Man-O-War Dad and I were even more well known here. Every new person that I meet I find already knows me but just like in Man-O-War Dad and I are running out of things to do. The storm that came through was a lot less severe than predicted but the winds have still been more than twenty knots for a few days. I went for a lot of runs, walks on the beach, sails on the windsurfer and paddle board excursions to pass the time. There are a ton of green turtles in the harbor here and I even saw a nurse shark swim under me while I was paddle boarding. I assume that the congregation of turtles is due to the jelly fish that litter the sea floor in the harbor. It took me a few days to identify them as jellyfish, they rest on the bottom with their tentacles pulsing constantly upward without leaving the sand.
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